


What a Phantastic Ending

by musicmillennia



Series: The Unusuals [5]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gore, Humor, I will never stop my title puns, M/M, Multi, References to Fire, References to Past Mutilation, References to Suicide, References to Torture, Rochedouche, Sass, Snark, Thomas is a jerk, a lot of shit happened to these poor babies, mentions of past rape, nothing unusual there, references to slavery, technically it is major character death because they're all dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 04:58:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3883165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicmillennia/pseuds/musicmillennia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not much, but it's an afterlife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What a Phantastic Ending

**Author's Note:**

> I tagged all the warnings in the tags. If you are upset by any of them, I'm going to reference the well-known haunted house sign and tell you to TURN BACK.  
> Although the gore, to me, is pretty minor. However the last time I wrote "mild" gore I made my dad sick, so maybe it's more intense than I think?
> 
> I will never stop my title puns.  
> Blame Grim Grinning Ghosts song for this.
> 
> I hope you enjoy :D

He might be just a(n unwilling) chef’s assistant at Castle La Fère, but Gascons aren’t used to settling when they want something more. While he works for his and his ill father’s board in the estate-turned-hotel, he carries with him the notion that one day he’s going to get out of here and do something great.

People often disregard his dreamy ramblings as the typical novelty of youth. Obviously they don’t know the stubborn kitchen boy. Charles D’Artagnan is nothing if not a quick study, determined, and…and really fucking clumsy.

Now, Serge, the head chef of La Fère, has told D’Artagnan many a story about the tragic history of the castle while they prepare meals for stuck-up guests with way too much money for their own good. People have hung themselves, gotten shot, stabbed, ill—there’s been so many battles here too, and countless have perished in the glory of them, their faces appearing in paintings hung all around the galleries.

So when D’Artagnan dies, the only thing he can think is, _well, there goes my painting_.

Because he’s not dangling from a rope; he doesn’t have a bullet lodged in his chest; no one’s taken a knife and sliced his throat; he’s healthy as a horse; he never made it to a battlefield.

When he dies, it’s because he trips on his own feet trying to hurry someone’s escargot along and _impales himself on a knife rack_.

He opens his eyes to cold shivers and hysterical laughter. But he’s still in the kitchen; why are the live action actors in here?

Two of  them are leaning on each other, cackling and stuttering over “d-did you see—he _fell_ on the _knife rack_!” and other such comments that, if you’ll pardon D’Artagnan’s pun, really add insult to injury.

He looks around them. There’s a blonde woman with a hand over her mouth, failing to cover her own muted laughter. “That’s such a shame,” she whispers between her fingers. Leaning on her is another beautiful woman with reddish brown curls; she’s crying from laughter and can’t seem to catch her breath.

There is another man who just stares at D’Artagnan like he can’t believe the boy is just _that_ stupid and it’s so disappointing. He has a laughing companion as well, her hand on his shoulder as she tries to keep herself upright.

“Poor lamb!” she wheezes, her breath sounding oddly like a death rattle.

So that’s how D’Artagnan meets Aramis, Porthos, Anne, Constance, Athos, and Milady. One was hung from a tree on the castle grounds, another was asphyxiated in bed, another beaten to death, another flayed alive, another burned to death, and another broken on the rack.

Once he’s given the You’re Dead Talk, Milady smirks and says, “Guess which one is which. Free sweets for each correct guess.”

(&)

It’s easy actually, because they all wear their deaths on their spirits.

Aramis died on the rack in 1635 after a few weeks in the dungeons below. His limbs are all stitched together in a mangled mess, some like his arm dangling just a little off his shoulder and his knee’s stitches are pulled so its separated from the rest of his leg, held to together only by strings. He is a painting of bruises and blood, and sometimes his skull splits open enough that he complains to Porthos to hold it together while he stitches it back up. Porthos also carries him around on his back like a limp doll.

Anne died nearly the same day as him. She had been pursued by a Comte de Rochefort, a well-known personage in the La Fère tours. What the pamphlets failed to mention however is when Anne refused him to try and pursue Aramis’ suit, he had both of them killed. He’d snuck into her bedroom shortly after ordering Aramis’ execution in secret; he raped her and then used a thin chain to strangle her. She walks around with a perpetual limp, wincing with every step. She is quiet and subdued, with a black and blue ropy scar as further proof of her pain.

Constance was killed trying to expose Rochefort. Her husband, Jacques, had been a cruel man, and the wretched Comte had promised him enough riches to disregard his wife’s pleas for justice. When she refused to be silenced, he’d beaten her. As her jagged facial scars and sluggishly bleeding scalp, the killing blow had been his smashing her against a window. Her ankle is shattered, so she too has a limp, her and Anne balancing each other out by leaning against one another. She is a walking kaleidoscope of black, blue, yellow, and red, but she’s so tragically beautiful she makes D’Artagnan want to recite poetry.

Porthos was a slave in La Fère in 1701. He disobeyed his masters by intervening when his mother and sisters were being whipped; after that, he kept rebelling, defending his fellow slaves, until the masters had no choice but to flay him as an example. As a result, his spirit is missing patches of skin, and sometimes if he moves to quickly most of it falls off with a wet _slop_. From his position, Aramis keeps most of what’s left on his back intact. Even in death he cares for others, and it doesn’t stop his comforting D’Artagnan and the others after they perished. Strips of his skin look as if they’d been deliberately cut, and not from the flaying—it turns out that Aramis hadn’t gotten the stitches from his postmortem, but from Porthos’ arms.

Milady and Athos both died in 1813, but not at the same time or in the same ways. Milady was hung by the other of Athos—her husband, what an exciting twist, wow (“Shut up”)—because she’d killed his brother Thomas in cold blood because he was a sociopathic hypocrite who _had_ to die. She’d stabbed him, and his fiancée caught her and alerted Athos, who as dictated by the law had to condemn her to death. Her neck is always at an awkward angle, covered in bruises so dark they’re almost black, with a giant gash covering her jugular. Every time she indulges the whim of a living person and takes a breath, it’s almost an echoing moan, as if the rope is still squeezing it.

Athos burned alive two months after in a mysterious fire that actually wasn’t mysterious at all once Milady shamelessly admitted she’d started it by putting just a little bit of alcohol on the curtains and shoving a candle at the spill. He looks like chicken left too long on the grill (because of course after all that time in the kitchen D’Artagnan makes _food analogies_ ): burnt charcoaled skin makes up his torso, half his face, and his left arm, so one eye is missing and his teeth show. His bones crackle every time he moves, quite a few of them exposed, and what isn’t is pinned under irritated, flaky red skin.

The funny thing about the two of them is that they cannot be apart for long periods of time. For all their hateful arguments and charged silences, D’Artagnan has never seen so many unspoken “fuck you”s taken literally in his life—er, afterlife?—Milady claims they are bound to each other, ‘til death _actually_ parts them, which will never happen of course because D’Artagnan suspects they won’t let that happen.

They’re probably still attached at the hip because Athos didn’t actually mean to sentence her to death.

“If Catherine had remained ignorant of her involvement,” he divulges after D’Artagnan’s been with them for a few weeks, “I would have congratulated her. The Thomas I knew had been an illusion; I found out shortly after her death that I had been played a fool. He had been planning to kill me and take my fortune for himself.”

“So—why do you act like you hate each other?”

Athos shrugs. Milady answers with a sultry curl of her lips, “Well, he _did_ put me to the rope.”

D’Artagnan thinks the other reason is that they’re bored. Weirdos.

(&)

A few hours after D’Artagnan recovers and whines—(“I do _not_ whine!” “Sure, pup.”)—about how stupid his death had been, he asks why none of them have passed on.

Aramis sighs from where he’s draped in Porthos’ lap. “Unfinished business, I suppose? It is a mystery.”

“We can’t leave the grounds,” Constance says, “Otherwise we’ll be destroyed.”

D’Artagnan can’t help it. “How do you know that?”

Anne’s gentle features twist into a menacing smirk that shakes his very core. “Why do you think Rochefort isn’t here?”

That’s right. Belatedly, D’Artagnan remembers that Rochefort had hung himself from the front hall chandelier two years after Anne’s death.

“Or Thomas?” Milady adds.

Oh. Well.

“What are we supposed to do around here?”

Porthos starts to laugh. His flesh gushes with the sound.

(&)

What _do_ they do for fun at Castle La Fère? Well, there’s sex—D’Artagnan has no idea how Porthos and Aramis manage it but there are some things you _cannot unhear_ when two mutilated ghosts decide to have a go in a closet—but so far Constance doesn’t seem too interested yet, so that’s not an option for him.

There’s a huge library, but D’Artagnan’s not really the sit-still-and-read kind; he prefers constantly moving, something hands-on.

So it’s fencing for him.

Constance, Porthos, and Athos are good with a sword, but Athos is the best. It takes a few days to learn how to pick up objects without going right through them, and even longer for the concentration to become second nature. Ghost hunting bullshit becomes so much more apparent when it doesn’t take that much energy to master it. (Really it’s being visible to the living that’s like getting run over by a semi. But D’Artagnan tries to do that anyway. The challenges keep him going for a while, putting his mind to them instead of the very real fact that his father is now alone in the world.)

During fencing lessons in the empty armory at buttfuck o’clock, Athos kicks his ass, gives him pointers, and snarks at him. He’s probably the best friend D’Artagnan’s ever had.

(&)

October is when they really amp up scaring people because of Halloween. It’s a fun pastime in general, and gets Castle La Fère plenty of publicity; unfortunately they can’t do it too much at any other time, unless they want everyone to leave and the place to close down and start crumbling around their heads. This is the time to let loose.

Aramis suggests a game of catch during a dinner party as their opening act.

“Catch with what?” D’Artagnan asks, to which Aramis grins like the Cheshire cat and—takes half of his head off.

Waving it around on a flappy wrist, he uses both halves of his mouth to say with raspy, torn vocal chords, “Any other questions?”

D’Artagnan knows he’s lost it when he busts out laughing.

It’s _way_ too fun playing catch with half of Aramis’ head. Together the spirits string his body up using flaps of Porthos’ skin and a couple knives to a wall so he can watch without fear of his body flopping over. Anne takes a seat next to him to watch the rest play.

Aramis yells at them as they fade into view for the rest of the guests.

“Really?” his voice sounds like a cliché horror movie ghost and it’s _perfect_ , “I can’t even throw and I can do better than that!”

Athos scoffs at the comment as Milady catches the half.

Aramis’ one eye and half-mouth dance on a playful smirk. “Careful dear,” he says, “that’s half my brain you’re touching.”

It goes on and on: “Oh Porthos, your flesh is so soft!...D’Artagnan, watch your step, we would not want you to _trip_ —OUCH! Constance, don’t _punt_ me!”

And yes, they clear the place out in about twenty seconds, a cacophony of screams and breaking glasses following the terrified guests and staff.

It’s the first time D’Artagnan hears Anne laugh. Constance smiles at her best friend and yep, D’Artagnan is definitely fucked.

(&)

Ghost hunters come to the castle when their little stunt reaches the papers and all over social media.

The spirits watch them…and do _nothing_.

D’Artagnan wants to do something just to freak them out, maybe say a nice hello to his father—he can’t anymore in person since Alexandre is now attended to by around the clock nurses as recompense for no lawsuit about the circumstances of his son’s death—but Athos gives him one of his eyebrows.

Nevertheless, D’Artagnan doesn’t back down. He gives the publicity argument; next thing the poor ghost hunters know, he’s allowed to show up on a thermal imaging camera and say “Hey” into one of their recorders.

Their reaction is _priceless_.

(&)

It finally happens when D’Artagnan and Constance are taking a walk around the grounds. Meaning, D’Artagnan is holding Constance up and together they hobble with terribly slow progress and difficulty.

D’Artagnan loves every second of it.

They’re both cold, but that just means she’s warm to him, a solid presence for all that she’s dead. The moonlight illuminates the spark in her eyes that never extinguished even in the face of Bonacieux’s efforts. She’s so strong and radiant and she deserved so much better— _deserves_ so much better—but D’Artagnan wants to try anyway because he is nothing if not stubborn.

She’s staring at the lunar flowers in the garden and he’s trying not to stare at her when she huffs and gives him one of her annoyed looks.

“Just kiss me, you idiot.”

And he can work with that.

(&)

His father doesn’t make it past next Christmas.

D’Artagnan’s there when he goes—ghosts have a sort of radar for incoming death. They can sense when someone is about to join their haunting grounds. Everyone, even Constance, has left the two of them alone for privacy. He’s grateful for that.

Alexandre passes quietly in his sleep on the winter solstice, around two o’clock in the morning. His spirit, however, is different from the rest of them: not a scratch of illness on him, and he looks to be D’Artagnan’s age, thick brown hair and a boyish smile.

“Charles?” he says, bewildered.

D’Artagnan embraces him for a good long time. Next, he sits him down and gives him the You’re Dead Talk. Or, tries to, but Alexandre beats him to it.

“I know I’m dead, son,” his father says, “I think I would know my corpse when I see it. Besides, I’m sixty-three and had a terminal illness. What I do _not_ understand is what you’re still doing here?”

So D’Artagnan introduces him to the others. Alexandre’s a bit pale after seeing their grotesque figures, but Porthos and Aramis are good at breaking the ice. There’s hope for the new ghost yet.

Then Alexandre _had_ to ask. He’s trying not to laugh too, which just makes it worse.

“Charles…did you _really_ trip and fall on a knife rack?”

D’Artagnan buries his head in his hands while Porthos busts his gut laughing—no, really, his skin flies off and intestines spill _everywhere_ —and Aramis quite literally falls apart at the seams joining him. Everyone else follows their lead like they’re all part of some stupid sitcom and the credits are about to roll.

Yet D’Artagnan grins into his palms, because that’s okay with him. He might not have achieved anything great in his life, but he got some great friends anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed :)


End file.
